After our last duo game of Tera my partner commented that we must log back into Guild Wars 2 sometime. I agreed of course, but that sort of stuck in my mind afterwards, for whatever reason GW2 just hasn’t been that ‘sticky’ a game for either of us – if either of us was that into it still we’d be playing it I’m sure.

In my recent post on scoring MMOs it scored equal highest so in theory I should be wanting to play it more than I do. I think in part it’s just ennui with the direction the game is going in. The addition of gear grinding was a real shame I feel as a GW1 fan, I wanted a game with ‘horizontal’ content not just another tiered gear ladder. Secondly I just don’t find the trinity-less dungeons fun at all even when played with the friends I normally play with. Given one of the major end-game PVE activities is the Fractals randomised dungeons that’s a problem for me.

I was excited about the personal story space, or housing for want of a better word, yet it turned out to be under-utilised in the extreme and still remains a ‘forgotten’ system. Syl talks about the town clothes system and the rather strange insistence by ArenaNet that costumes should not be allowed in combat. Personally I think this is a mistake – I agree 100% with Syl that during the ever chaotic combat the last thing I worry about is the fashion-sense of any nearby players. The dye system is very well implemented and quick to switch around, but why is the clothing system so arcane – especially the transmog stones?

The ‘geological’ pace of planning and updates, as Bhagpuss recently classified it, is a concern for me too. The focus on more open world content is certainly welcome and I’m hoping when I come back to the game again for a new character leveling stint I’ll not feel over familiar with the majority of the events – that of course presumes that the devs deliver on a major refresh every so often. A good dose of open world story content would go a long way to attracting us back into game. So far the ‘living story’ has been glacial in it’s delivery and rather lack-luster I would add. I’ll be keeping a close eye on what follows though, that’s the beauty of the buy-to-play model I suppose.

Perhaps the other major issue for me is that, in comparison with SWTOR, I found the main storyline somewhat poorly paced. Bits were great and exciting to play, but other bits – the majority perhaps – was fairly bland. The decisions we take have little to no actual impact which harms replayability in the longer-term as well. This dulled my desire to play alts in the short term because for me it’s more about story than just playing other characters.